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Author mark.dickinson
Recipients christian.heimes, mark.dickinson, rhettinger, scoder, stutzbach
Date 2019-04-01.07:12:31
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Message-id <1554102751.22.0.217568451762.issue36493@roundup.psfhosted.org>
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Special cases aside, I think this is a YAGNI. The "obvious" formulas `(a + b)/2)` and `0.5 * (a + b)` _do_ do exactly the right thing (including giving a perfectly correctly-rounded answer with round-ties-to-even on a typical IEEE 754-using machine) provided that subnormals and values very close to the upper limit are avoided. If you're doing floating-point arithmetic with values of size > 1e300, you've probably already got significant issues.

I could see specialist uses for this, e.g., in a general purpose bisection algorithm, but I'm not convinced it's worth adding something to the math library just for that.
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Date User Action Args
2019-04-01 07:12:31mark.dickinsonsetrecipients: + mark.dickinson, rhettinger, scoder, christian.heimes, stutzbach
2019-04-01 07:12:31mark.dickinsonsetmessageid: <1554102751.22.0.217568451762.issue36493@roundup.psfhosted.org>
2019-04-01 07:12:31mark.dickinsonlinkissue36493 messages
2019-04-01 07:12:31mark.dickinsoncreate